Penetration Testing as a Service
Penetration testing that runs as often as your environment changes.
Continuous, autonomous penetration testing delivered as a managed service. Uncover what an attacker could do in your environment and prove successful remediation on-demand.
FIND > FIX > VERIFY | REPEAT
Why once a year is not enough
Point-in-time assurance ages the moment it is issued.
A penetration test tells you what an attacker could have reached on the day it ran. By the time the report is signed off, you have deployed changes, onboarded users, granted permissions, exposed new services and retired old ones. Every one of those changes is untested surface, and the fixes you closed off and reported to the board have not been verified against a live attack since the day they were made.
Test on your schedule
No booking a tester six weeks out. Testing becomes an operational process you run when a change is ready.
Prioritise by proven exploitability
Theoretical vulnerabilities are exploited to determine their real risk to your organisation. Severity is adjusted up and down accordingly, so your team spends its time on the issues that carry consequences.
Evidence your team can act on
Every attack path carries fine-grained proof of the exploit. Your IT team can remediate an individual finding and retest it themselves, without waiting for a retest window.
Purple teaming on demand
Test whether your SOC detects what it should. Validate detection rules and train your team through regular exercises, triggered when you want them.
How a test runs
One weakness rarely matters. Three chained together usually do.
The platform works through your network the way an attacker would, combining weaknesses to establish what they lead to. It looks past the known and patchable to what gets organisations breached: weak and reused credentials, exposed data, misconfigurations, ineffective controls and permissive policies. Exploitation is real but contained, so nothing in production breaks while it runs.
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Scope and schedule
You set what is in scope and the maximum run time for the test. Once that is agreed, you decide when it runs rather than waiting for a booking.
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The test runs
No script and no prior knowledge of what it will find. The platform explores your environment and decides where to go next based on what it finds there. You watch it progress in real time.
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Weaknesses are chained and exploited
Individually minor issues are combined to establish where they lead. Credentials found in one place are tried in another, and permissions are followed to see what they open.
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Findings arrive with proof
Each attack path is presented with the evidence of the exploit behind it, ordered by what it reached rather than by a generic severity score.
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Your team remediates
Remediation guidance is given at the level of the individual finding and at the level of the pattern behind it, so the same weakness does not reappear elsewhere.
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The fix is verified
A verification run confirms the fix worked, against the same attack path that proved the problem. Then the cycle begins again on your schedule.
The obligations between assessments
Most of the requirement sits between the annual tests.
Most regimes require a penetration test each year. Fewer buyers realise how much of the obligation falls in the months either side of it.
PCI DSS 11.4.4
Remediation has to be retested
Exploitable vulnerabilities found in a penetration test must be corrected, then the testing repeated to confirm the correction worked. Continuous testing gives you that verification on demand, with the evidence retained.
After significant change
Changes trigger testing of their own
Testing is required at least annually and after any significant change: new systems in scope, network architecture changes, major application upgrades. These do not arrive on an annual cycle, and they are difficult to cover with a booked engagement.
Continuous testing supports your obligations under
- PCI DSS v4.0.1
- DORA
- SOC
- ISO/IEC 27001
- NIST
- CIS
- UK GDPR
- Board and internal assurance reporting
Where your regime requires CREST-accredited penetration testing, we can arrange that too. See the questions below.
Two services, two questions
Knowing what is wrong is not the same as knowing what it costs you.
Vulnerability management and penetration testing are often spoken about as though they were the same discipline. They answer different questions, and most organisations need both answers.
Vulnerability Management
What weaknesses exist across our estate?
- Continuous discovery, tracking and reporting of known vulnerabilities across your assets
- Coverage and completeness, so nothing is missed
- Feeds your patching and remediation programme
Penetration Testing as a Service
What could an attacker do with them?
- Active, safe exploitation to prove which weaknesses chain together into real compromise
- Impact and priority, so you know what to fix first
- Validates that the programme worked
Vulnerability management tells you the size of the problem. Penetration testing tells you which part of it will hurt you.
What you receive
Harder to breach, and able to prove it.
Four artefacts come out of a test cycle. Two are for the people doing the work, two are for the people who will ask whether it was done.
The route, drawn out
A record of where the platform got to and how, written so your engineers can follow it back through their own systems. It settles arguments about whether a weakness is theoretical.
Nobody has to take it on trust
A queue, not a backlog
Short enough to work through, ordered so the top of it is worth doing first, and specific enough that each item can be assigned to somebody without further analysis.
Sprint-ready the day it arrives
The audit trail
Every cycle is retained, so you can show when a weakness appeared, when it closed and what confirmed the closure. This is the part assessors ask for and most organisations cannot produce.
Evidence with dates on it
The version for people who will not read the rest
Where you stood at the start of the cycle, what moved, and what is still open. Short enough to go into a board pack without being rewritten first.
One page, no translation needed
Independently assessed
Questions we are asked
What buyers check before they commission a test.
Is Talanos CREST-accredited for penetration testing?
No. Our CREST accreditation covers Security Operations. Penetration Testing as a Service is delivered through an autonomous testing platform, not by CREST-accredited human testers.
Some compliance regimes require CREST-accredited penetration testing for an annual PCI DSS, ISO 27001 or DORA engagement. We deliver that through our CREST-accredited delivery partner, and we will tell you upfront which parts of your programme need it. Continuous testing then runs between those engagements, verifying that remediation held and covering the changes you have made since.
Do you offer manual penetration testing?
Yes, through our CREST-accredited delivery partner, where a compliance requirement or a specific application calls for it. Our own service is the continuous, platform-delivered testing described on this page.
How often can we run a test?
As often as you like. You control the scope and the maximum run time for each cycle, and beyond that there is no limit on how frequently you test.
How is this different from a vulnerability scan?
A scan identifies known vulnerabilities from a signature database. This service exploits them, chains them together, and proves what an attacker could reach as a result.
Under PCI DSS these are separate obligations. Requirement 11.3 covers scanning and Requirement 11.4 covers penetration testing, so a clean scan report does not satisfy 11.4.
How does the service scale?
Tenants are sized by the number of IP addresses tested concurrently. As a managed service provider we scale the concurrency available to your tests as your needs change, so you are not growing and shrinking a licence of your own.
What does a trial involve?
A scoped test against an agreed part of your environment, with the results, attack paths and prioritised findings reviewed with our team. You see the evidence before you commit to anything.
Ready to talk
See what an attacker would find.
Start with a trial against a scoped part of your environment. You will see the proven attack paths, the prioritised findings and the remediation guidance before you make any commitment.